skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The entire field was trumped by Deep Learning, which takes as its premise that you can infer relationships from the exabytes of human rambling on the internet, rather than having to laboriously encode them explicitly

I don't think machine learning can ever replace data modeling, because data modeling is often creative and/or normative. If we want to express what data must look like and which relationships there should be, then machine learning doesn't help and we have no other choice than to laboriously encode or designs. And as long as we model data we will have a need for data exchange formats.

You could categorise data exchange formats as follows:

a) Ad-hoc formats with ill defined syntax and ill defined semantics. That would be something like the CSV family of formats or the many ad-hoc mini formats you find in database text fields.

b) Well defined syntax with externally defined often informal semantics. XML and JSON are examples of that.

c) Well defined syntax with some well defined formal semantics. That's where I see Semantic Web standards such as RDF (in its various notations), RDFS and OWL.

So if the task is to reliably merge, cleanse and interpret data from different sources then we can achieve that with less code on the basis of (c) type data exchange formats.

But it seems we're stuck with (b). I understand some of the reasons. The Semantic Web standards are rather complex and at the same time not powerful enough to express all the things we need. But that is a different issue than what you are talking about.
Yeah.

But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...
On the subject of great-looking maps I highly recommend the second Austro-Hungarian Military Survey [1] from the 1860s-1870s, some of the details in those maps are truly exceptional (one of my personal projects consists in mapping the forested area of Romania's territory from nowadays using those maps).

A little less accurate but more beautiful is the first Hapsburg Military Survey, from the late 1700s [2], when and if I'll ever get a bigger house I'll definitely hang some prints of those maps on the walls.

[1] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurvey/?laye...

[2] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey/?layer...
Their marketing blog does a great job of painting them as smart people with good processes. Sadly, I learned the hard way (by trialling their software and immediately discovering a handful of dumb bugs that should’ve been caught by QA, plus serious security problems[0], and some OSS licence violations[1]) that it seems to not actually be the case. This situation where they continue to pump out blog posts about hard drive stats, yet don’t even have a status page for reporting outages, is another example of their marketing-driven approach to development.

I have mentioned this on HN a couple times now[2][3], including again just yesterday. I really dislike doing this because I feel like I am piling on—but as much as I hate it, I feel even more strongly that people deserve to be informed about these serious ongoing failures at Backblaze so that they can make more informed choices about what storage/backup provider to use. I also genuinely hope that I can incentivise them to actually start following software development best practices, since they do provide a valuable service and I’d like them to succeed. If they keep doing what they’re doing now, I absolutely expect to see a massive data breach and/or data loss event at some point, since they are clearly unwilling or unable to properly handle security or user privacy today—and I’ve gotten the impression over time that some prominent people at the company think these criticisms are invalid and they need not make any substantive changes to their processes.

[0] https://twitter.com/zetafleet/status/1304664097989054464

[1] https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1215311286814281728

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25899802

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24839757
Great point. I will add that RW600 does require a reoccurring membership for $468/yr after the first year.
Just use NextDNS. DNS blocking is just so much more efficient. And gets the job done 98% of time.
Internet outages hit the East Coast, causing issues for Verizon, Zoom, etc.
I had one, running Linux. Gave it away to the OpenBSD project. The screen is just too small to be useful. The 12" MacBook, while equally anemic, is far more usable. Hopefully they make future M1 MacBooks that are lighter, the M1 MacBook Air is significantly heavier than the 12" MacBook.

I also have a Planet Gemini, the spiritual successor to the Psion 5, that I still have but to be frank almost never use. That would be a much better candidate for tiniest laptop in the West (it ships with Android but you can install Linux).

I've had a bunch of other similar ultra-compact computers with keyboards, from the Cambridge Z88 to the HP95LX and 200LX, Sony Clié UX50 and Nokia E62 and N800. The reality never matches the dream.
In the USA, the Disney Channel is mostly like this year round.
Completely unrelated, but I somehow thought https://lobste.rs had invented a new shell (script) pattern at first.
> I'm excited to invite you to the first general meeting of a new worker-owned CO-OP (cooperative) business aimed at making it easy for the masses to shop sustainable friendly products.

"The masses" is a somewhat dehumanizing phrase.
Think of life as a huge legacy system. It's incredibly complex, yet many of the systems are on the brink of exploding. DNA code is a mess: remnants of retroviruses, non-functional pseudogenes, the expression patterns are incredibly hard to understand. If a God was building the life around us, I'd imagine it to be much more tidy. You know, God being all-mighty and all.
It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies.
So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain.
Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.
Haha wow I love that idea. The first thing that comes up is that back in the day, I was taught git concepts and commands by a few different people, but it wouldn't "stick". But then I met this one engineer, and his teaching approach worked _super_ well for me.

So I like the idea that a bunch of different people could teach the same material, and you could be the platform to help people discover it.

Off the top of my head, here are some things I'd love help with (sorry if it's too specific haha):

- imagemagick CLI concepts

- Better understanding bash

- Better understanding different types of joins in sql (15 years later, I still can't grock that)
I can't be the only one who immediately thought of libraries in the context of software development.
I like this intro!

Good to see ‘random’ redefined as pick random two then assign to one with least connections, which works strictly better than either random or least connections alone.

Misses a couple categories that may be relevant: least hops or best transit type network-mapped balancing to get to the ideal set of servers globally, as well as a technique that not-so-simply connects the user to the geography with the fastest response for them right then.

While the article notes value of fewer connections for a stream, you can take a bit longer in setup for a stream to get it right, as you and the viewer will pay the price longer if you get it wrong.

All this gets much more complicated when balancing very large objects, as you have to consider content availability and cache bin packing among the servers you balance to.
Yeah, the frontpage is just lowest common denominator. If you get into the topics you're interested in there is a lot of impressively high quality content from small to medium sized creators.
Over- engineering has become a disease, and has reached pandemic -level proportions, primarily driven by resume-padders and clueless management folk.
The placement of the address bar is configurable, but maybe the tab view should flip along with it...
Twitter has done far more than silence Trump. The NY Post article they shut down before the election turned out to be more true than false. It wasn't an attempt to incite a coup, it was an attempt to report some inconvenient facts about the son of a man who is now president and corruption. I'm glad Biden is president as I think it was a needed change that will be good for the US and the world but I still found this shut down of information deeply troubling.
The $50 safes are not fire-rated... and hardly break-in rated.
For fire-safety you need something big, and mostly heavy, which will be costly (shipping/moving it alone)
My thoughts exactly on point #1. Nothing in a hot path should take multiple seconds.
Show HN: A kernel module that makes a block device backed by userspace program
Can Intel Succeed?
I don't believe this is correct. Certain cable television channels were originally ad free (e.g. USA, Nickelodeon) because they competed against free OTA broadcasts which were ad supported.

Similarly to pay per view.

That those channels now show commercials (and has for a long enough time that people think "it was always like this") just cements our expectations that commercials are a fact of life.
I suspect it is the perception that it's a bit pedantic to correct an otherwise correct answer. I agree with you, but also don't really think it needs to be corrected every single time someone posts whitelist/blacklist.

EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.
This is the new UI. The old one was much faster to operate. It was like this: you are in this page, tap the tabs button at the top, the screen with all the open tabs appears, tap + at the same place of the other button and get to the top sites / bookmarks screen. Or tap the URL and get directly there.
The new UI takes more taps and I don't understand what that is supposed to improve.

I updated my tablet and my old phone to check the UI. I'm staying on the old Firefox on my main phone, partly because of the UI and 90% because of the add-ons I'm using. Not all of them are available on the new Firefox.

Mozilla self sabotages every few years, then fixes things. Unfortunately they lose users along the way.
It's fairly easy to build passwordless scheme.

1. Service picks asymmetric scheme (RSA, ECDSA, etc.)

2. User generates public/private pair of keys locally

3. User registers its public key in the service

4. Now user can sign anything thus confirming its identity

No third-party service required. Users have to keep their private keys locally, but BeyondIdentity also requires this. I don't feel their complicated scheme has much sense. Also they've mentioned the use of machine learning, this looks even more strange.
>>> ...rotating layers to change the bulk performance of materials composed of anisotropic plies is very old technology developed originally for aerospace / racing applications.

Indeed the original engineered composite material: Plywood.
Speculation on the other thread is too many people have flagged the other post.
Giving advice is a last resort
For software of the 90s, 2000s

Check Sourceforge, Freshmeat.net archives, IRC, old anonymous FTP mirrors, etc.
> It was never heard in court.

This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.

The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.
No PhD, no problem: One software engineer’s path to applied science
Why does scrolling go faster if I wiggle the mouse?
> That's a feature. Icons on my home screen should only ever be native applications. Use bookmarks for websites instead.

Why shouldn’t I be allowed to put a bookmark as an icon? That’s essentially what a PWA is anyways. A fancy bookmark that behaves like a native app. Why are you the arbitrator of what I can do?
The sites we visit do. I didn’t tell spammers my phone number either, but every org that requires that field to be filled thinks it has an obligation to sell it to them. Skipping few steps, it is trust problem. We don’t trust each other, thus some money should be spent on being top trusted and top wanted at open markets/serps. We have to trust big tech because staking money is the only way to the trust and biggest money concentrates at big tech. What should be done?
> I haven't used the new Edge, but simply inverting the colors is going to give you a bad time, all your photos will look rather strange

Try it: the invert is intelligent enough to work in most cases. I think it substracts the background, which is often white/whitish, so you get the normal image but on a black background.

Also, there's an option to not invert pictures if you prefer.
1) For serving you a language version it's generally IP-based. The services like MaxMind update their DBs regularly because IP<>country assignments are not constant. (It's a bit of show in case of mobile IPs, like I'm in south of France and sometimes Google thinks I'm in Paris etc.).

Some users of those geoip services might have stale data if they don't update often.

I remember reading on HN about a guy from Switzerland whose IP is regularly changed in those DBs from "Switzerland, $French_speaking_region" to "Switzerland, $German_speaking_region" back and forth, so each month he sees local Swiss websites in a different language!

2) For getting your precise location, apart from GPS data, they also have a giant DB of wifi access points' names collected by passively sniffing wifis on a few billion Android devices (and other devices with Google software) all over the world; by intersecting this with names of wifis visible from your machine, they can assess your location even if your device has no GPS device built-in.

3) On mobile phones, your location is often taken based on the mobile network you're on. If you go abroad and connect in roaming, from network perspective you might be seen as being in the capital of your country, and have IP from your country, even if you're not there physically.

4) Some companies just use the CC number you signed with as the indicator of your country, regardless where you are physically.

TL;DR; it's a mess
Gitlab reshuffles its paid subscription plans, drops its Bronze/Starter tier
Users of software care about their own workflows, their pet-features, and the bugs they hit. Some are willing to put up the work to patch in those features or fix those bugs and upstream them. Fewer still are people who are invested enough to dedicate themselves to a project as a part-time job.

I don't think this dynamic has changed since the dawn of open source.
Do you hide, read, or ignore grayed out comments?
Recently there was a great discussion about reform of down votes, and how those affect a comment. I’ve been paying more attention to comments that are downvoted and grayed out, especially on highly contentious posts, so I’m curious how other people view those comments. Do you hide them, ignore, or read?
I think is down to the fact that most websites target chrome first as it has the biggest market share.

I've noticed reddit is rather slow in ff but other than that not really nocoed anything massively slow or broken.
This article isn't very substantive.
https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/devices
Following Blackblaze report on them a few years ago "they appear to be great, but we buy in bulk and there is not enough volume of them there for us", I decided to use Toshiba drives almost exclusively, as a sort of fun experiment.

Drives deployed below 400, usage exclusively NAS (raid 1, raid10 and raid 6) inside below 50 employees companies. They appear to be insanely reliable and high performers, to the point the +15% price tax for them in french store seems highly justified for me.

Purely anecdotal results, of course.
The first time using an iPhone. It was pure astonishment seeing how much better the device was over my previous [dumb]phone.
The incidence rate of HIV infection is the same in the US as it is in France, Span, or Italy though higher than the Scandinavian countries. I couldn't easily find data for the current rate of new infections, but its not immediately obvious to me that access to health care is the major driving factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_...
The Business of Books: The high-stakes world of pirate publishing
This was the HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25147951

And I must apologise, I was wrong when I said they didn't update their status page during the outage. They don't have a status page.
Separately storing the encryption software isn't needed if you use LUKS.
I just got this email:

----

Effective January 26, 2021, GitLab has phased out the GitLab Bronze/Starter subscription tier.

Current Bronze/Starter customers have over a year to transition
Transition discount offers are available to current customers
Over the last few years, GitLab has evolved into a complete DevOps platform. Many Bronze/Starter customers adopted GitLab just for source code management (SCM) or continuous integration (CI), but GitLab is now a robust DevOps platform that can replace entire toolchains. GitLab customers are achieving faster releases, lower toolchain costs and more productive developers.

The Bronze/Starter tier does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects from a tier and is limiting us from investing to improve GitLab for all customers. Ending availability of the Bronze/Starter tier will help us accelerate development on customers’ priority needs such as improving usability, availability and performance, and making sure that security and compliance are enterprise-grade.

We understand that this change could be disruptive for our current Bronze/Starter customers, which is why GitLab is offering transition options and price discounts to ease your transition to Premium over the next three years.

All Bronze/Starter customers can choose a free upgrade to GitLab Premium for the remainder of their subscription for the first 25 users.
At your next renewal before January 26, 2022, all Bronze/Starter tier customers can choose to
Either renew at the Bronze/Starter tier for US$ 4 per user per month for one additional year
Or opt in for discounted GitLab Premium prices for the next three years. For customers with 25 users or less, your discounted transition prices (paid annually) are US$ 6, US$ 9, US$ 15 per user per month for your first, second and third renewals respectively.
To claim this offer, please visit the GitLab Customer Portal.

To learn more about this change, watch this video [http://youtu.be/zG9d1y2jE14], visit our customer FAQ or contact GitLab Sales.

To address your questions and feedback, we have created a space in the GitLab Community Forum, which is actively monitored by GitLab Team members involved with this change.

Thank you for the trust you place in GitLab to help you deliver software faster and more efficiently. We appreciate your use of GitLab and look forward to delivering more value to you every month.
Try (don’t) to drive by looking only at the display of it than..
What does SBC mean?
Neither should be reported as they're lifestyle ailments, ailments that occur as a result of poor lifestyle choices.
I never tried the Oartec so I can't compare to it, but I'm really happy with it. There's also now the RP3 Model T that was released a few months after I got the regular RP3. I'm in the PNW, so I was able to save on shipping by picking up the RP3 in person from the US distributor.

I'm really quite happy with it and far prefer it to a C2. The software is pretty decent too and the force curve in particular is quite useful to help you figure out how to connect all three motions smoothly for mostly consistent even power.

Family and friends that have used it have struggled with getting started with it but mainly because they've learned such bad form from static machines like the C2. But near as I can tell that will happen with anyone used to a static rower that's never been on the water or coached on proper form.
Even in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.
This is whataboutism. You can talk about other reasons for using firefox if you'd like (although you'd have to mention what those reasons are.) We're talking about privacy right now and firefox does not fit the bill.
Same, also fios in Brooklyn. Not getting my full speeds but I am getting 100Mbps, which is far better than the 60 Kbps I was getting.

Ironically things recovered within 30 seconds me of messaging our systems team to ask if the development VPN was having an outage. That's like a magic rule of internet outages, isn't it? Nothing works until you try to show someone else the issue, then it all works.
The closest I have experienced is setting meetings where the sole objective is to work and chat. I have enjoyed these sessions, but to acknowledge your point, they are nothing like spontaneously grabbing a coffee with a colleague.
With some forms of caching it's much simpler: the browser sends an ETag or If-Modified-Since and the server is supposed to return 304 Not Modified to optimize the load if the cached resource is still valid.
I'm always excited for this yearly post. Are there other vendors that provide this kind of insightful info for other types of infrastructure?

Also, kudos to Backblaze. I'm sure there's some side brand benefit to all the work that goes into making this public, but it's clear it's mostly just altruism.
It runs Linux beautifully. Absolutely the nicest portable Linux machine I've ever owned
Eh, owning debt is always a possibility with options. But I agree, especially the people who YOLO large amounts of money on dailies. But honestly, that’s what makes WSB fun. There’s a mix of everything, serious traders, reckless gamblers. It’s insanely entertaining, even just from the sidelines.